The "magic" versus "timesaving" differences of philosophy is a new way of putting it. It encapsulates a gut feeling I had about the two but hadn't put my finger on until now.

Especially when starting from scratch, learning RoR is kind of like "ooh, shiny, magic, wow!" and learning Django is like "so you do this, which does (this and this and this behind the scenes), then do this..". I love magic as much as the next gal, but not being able to fully grok RoR from the start was partly why I chose Django as well.

It's open source. Start groking.

This basically just says Rails has a better user interface than Django (not necessarily something I agree with).

Django makes you feel like a power user because it forces you to learn more in order to use it?

There's a limit to how much I want to try to read up behind a tutorial when I'm just trying a new framework out. If my natural desire to understand what magic lines of code does causes me to break focus, tab out, google a bit, find some explanation that may or may not even be correct... yeah, I get put off a little.

And yet the argument here in favour of Django is that not as much is hidden from the user... which may cause some users to lose focus as you put it.

I find this this statement hypocritical.

I'm not sure where you managed to conflate my use of the word "I" with generalisations about "some users".

To me, this difference is encoded in the development philosophy of Python vs. Ruby.

If you like the meta-magic of Ruby, you'll probably like Rails. If you like the straightforward nature of Python, you'll probably like Django more.